SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

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huckelberry
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

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drumdude wrote:
Wed Mar 08, 2023 9:32 pm
huckelberry wrote:
Wed Mar 08, 2023 9:22 pm

Drumdude, the person surviving a 33 thousand foot fall is interesting. I am not following what you are seeing as Daniel proving the point against him. I do not understand what you see that you think he has gotten wrong.
It's clear when you see how he edited his post. He was trying to say that surviving a 33-thousand-foot fall was as unlikely as a universe popping into existence with the exact properties necessary for human life to exist. Clearly, it's not. Now he has added the additional condition that a drop of his favorite soft drink not be spilled during the fall.

It demonstrates that his belief in something being unlikely is an assumption. He didn't know what the odds were for surviving a fall from that height and now he does. He doesn't know what the odds are for specific Universal conditions being created, either. It's likely he's just as wrong there as well.
Drumdude, I can see your point that no real probability information is included. I might incline to think the unknown aspect is large enough that probability is not a useful word in this context. If my skeptical cap slips on I prefer thinking that the universe is made the way it is and has always been in its recurring presence. Turtles all the way down. Of course I can imagine multiple changing universes. Nothing to stop the speculation. Either variation and perhaps others show fine tuning to not be proof.

I find it suggestive in the face of uncertainty.

I think Peterson was making a poetic not mathematical observation that the existence of life in the universe is surprising and amazing. That is why he made a comparison to an extraordinary fall which he originally described as resulting in no injury unlike the known experience you brought to our attention. He added the extra about unspilled drink to emphasize that for any reader missing that point I would expect.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by drumdude »

huckelberry wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:03 am
the existence of life in the universe is surprising and amazing. That is why he made a comparison to an extraordinary fall which he originally described as resulting in no injury unlike the known experience you brought to our attention. He added the extra about unspilled drink to emphasize that for any reader missing that point I would expect.
The survival from 33,000ft wasn't less surprising and amazing to me despite the relatively high probability of survival. The same applies to the Universe. If the Universe could only be this way, do to natural laws, does that make it somehow less amazing?

It sounds like for DCP, he's trying to have it both ways. He wants us to appreciate just how amazingly rare and unlikely this Universe is, while at the same time saying it was inevitable because a Creator made it.

If this all was simply inevitable, and just a larger and more complicated version of an ant farm, that takes a lot of the wonder out of it. For me, anyway.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

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drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:29 am
If this all was simply inevitable, and just a larger and more complicated version of an ant farm, that takes a lot of the wonder out of it. For me, anyway.
I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I think I see it.

My own bet is that life, and even intelligent life, is indeed pretty inevitable just because of the way the world fundamentally works. If we really do need natural constants within a narrow range of values, my further bet is that there is some deeper set of laws than the ones we now know, which imply that the values we have are also inevitable. The coupling constants and the ratios of the particle bare masses to the Planck mass must all be mathematical constants, and the particular set of fundamental particles that we have must be determined by group theory or something.

That does kind of imply that our world isn't so special. It isn't an exceptional and rare kind of world, among possible worlds. It's a run-of-the-mill reality—and so any gushing about how awesome it all is only rubs the disappointment in harder, if you thought it was actually unique.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

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Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 8:28 am
drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:29 am
If this all was simply inevitable, and just a larger and more complicated version of an ant farm, that takes a lot of the wonder out of it. For me, anyway.
I hadn't thought of it that way before, but I think I see it.

My own bet is that life, and even intelligent life, is indeed pretty inevitable just because of the way the world fundamentally works. If we really do need natural constants within a narrow range of values, my further bet is that there is some deeper set of laws than the ones we now know, which imply that the values we have are also inevitable. The coupling constants and the ratios of the particle bare masses to the Planck mass must all be mathematical constants, and the particular set of fundamental particles that we have must be determined by group theory or something.

That does kind of imply that our world isn't so special. It isn't an exceptional and rare kind of world, among possible worlds. It's a run-of-the-mill reality—and so any gushing about how awesome it all is only rubs the disappointment in harder, if you thought it was actually unique.
Sheriff Woody wrote:You're a Buzz Lightyear!
We're a universe!
Are you familiar with Jeremy England's proposal regarding Entropy and the driving force that creates life? https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-th ... -20140122/ I would be interested in your input. It is from 2014 and I am not familiar with where the physics community or Jeremy stands on the proposal now.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by huckelberry »

drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:29 am
huckelberry wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:03 am
the existence of life in the universe is surprising and amazing. That is why he made a comparison to an extraordinary fall which he originally described as resulting in no injury unlike the known experience you brought to our attention. He added the extra about unspilled drink to emphasize that for any reader missing that point I would expect.
The survival from 33,000ft wasn't less surprising and amazing to me despite the relatively high probability of survival. The same applies to the Universe. If the Universe could only be this way, do to natural laws, does that make it somehow less amazing?

It sounds like for DCP, he's trying to have it both ways. He wants us to appreciate just how amazingly rare and unlikely this Universe is, while at the same time saying it was inevitable because a Creator made it.

If this all was simply inevitable, and just a larger and more complicated version of an ant farm, that takes a lot of the wonder out of it. For me, anyway.
Drumdude, I found myself a bit taken aback and puzzled by the ant farm image. It did make me think of too many hours in a Mormon chapel. I do not know if that is what you were thinking of. Normally I think of life as more interesting than that.

But inevitable? I find myself thinking that everything that actually happens is inevitable because a result of the prior conditions. We speak in a speculative mode about future possibilities as not inevitable so we can make decisions which might effect the result. But those speculations as they happen or are considered are a result of prior conditions so inevitable . The decisions made by learning from past events are inevitable. From an objective viewpoint everything is inevitable with or without a creator.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by Physics Guy »

I remember reading about England's stuff at the time, and I think I at least skimmed the paper. It was interesting, but not at all revolutionary.

Contrary to what people from places like the Discovery Institute often like to say, thermodynamics is absolutely not opposed to the spontaneous development of highly ordered structures such as living organisms. Entropy cannot decrease, and instead tends to increase; the more a process increases entropy, the more readily the process can happen. Despite all one might have heard, entropy is not this universal force for decay and corruption and death. Entropy is a yin/yang kind of thing, neutral. Entropy increase makes everything happen that tends to just happen by default without anything in particular having to force it to happen. Those things include death and decay, but also birth and growth. Entropy's bad rep just comes from our tendency to take things we like for granted but look for something to blame when things we don't like come along.

So maybe there are more people than I realise who were surprised by England's statements, but to me he was just filling in some detail on what everyone had been assuming all along, that metabolic structures must be really good at producing entropy, because nothing that complicated could evolve otherwise.

I wasn't really all that interested in England's paper, moreover, because even though I'm also really interested in entropy, my interests and his seem to be just about opposite. He was assuming the things that I want to see demonstrated, and demonstrating things that I'm content to assume. Whatever entropy actually is, I'm quite sure that life produces lots of it, and that the wonderful power of producing lots of entropy is what drives the emergence of life, the way the wonderful power of compound interest drives the emergence of banking. My questions are about what the heck entropy exactly is, because it's not even really a thing. It's superfluous.

The law of entropy increase is a handy rule of thumb, but it can never be needed to explain anything that ever happens. Whatever happens, happens because something pushes something else (more or less). It's all deterministic force and motion. Thinking that the laws of thermodynamics are independent natural laws alongside all the laws of motion is like thinking that "controlling the center" is an additional way to win a chess game besides forcing checkmate.

If you try to build a perpetual motion machine of the second kind, the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells you that your machine will not work. If you try to build it anyway, indeed it won't work—but not because the angel of entropy will appear and smite you down for defying its law. Instead some little detail or other of your machine just won't work as you thought it would work, for reasons that you'll be able to understand perfectly well in terms of forces and motion, once you look at everything really carefully. So entropy isn't really a problem that will afflict your machine, exactly. The law of entropy is just the statement that your machine is bound to have some kind of problem. It's a theorem, not a cause.

At least that's how it should be. No-one has actually proven the theorem yet, so we call it a law. It's a well-tested conjecture, like Fermat's Last Theorem was before Wiles finally proved it. So since we are still figuring out exactly what entropy is and why it has to increase, explaining life in terms of entropy increase doesn't count to me as a real explanation of life.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by drumdude »

huckelberry wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 8:03 pm
drumdude wrote:
Thu Mar 09, 2023 12:29 am
The survival from 33,000ft wasn't less surprising and amazing to me despite the relatively high probability of survival. The same applies to the Universe. If the Universe could only be this way, do to natural laws, does that make it somehow less amazing?

It sounds like for DCP, he's trying to have it both ways. He wants us to appreciate just how amazingly rare and unlikely this Universe is, while at the same time saying it was inevitable because a Creator made it.

If this all was simply inevitable, and just a larger and more complicated version of an ant farm, that takes a lot of the wonder out of it. For me, anyway.
Drumdude, I found myself a bit taken aback and puzzled by the ant farm image. It did make me think of too many hours in a Mormon chapel. I do not know if that is what you were thinking of. Normally I think of life as more interesting than that.

But inevitable? I find myself thinking that everything that actually happens is inevitable because a result of the prior conditions. We speak in a speculative mode about future possibilities as not inevitable so we can make decisions which might effect the result. But those speculations as they happen or are considered are a result of prior conditions so inevitable . The decisions made by learning from past events are inevitable. From an objective viewpoint everything is inevitable with or without a creator.
In this case, I think that DCP’s argument implies that God deliberately created everything in an inevitable way. That’s how the discovery institute would put it. Their creator God created everything from the sheer force of will. And it couldn’t have been any other way, because Gods will couldn’t have been any other way. Just like the child wanted the ant farm and so he set it up.

Mormon God of course is very different, he has a body and is limited to the same physical universe we are. Mormon theology is clear that God didn’t create matter or spirits. But I’ve called out DCP on that before, and he wants to pretend all the evangelical creationist arguments work just as well for Mormonism.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by Marcus »

so, it has been clearly pointed out that Peterson plagiarized his latest entry on 'sentient puddles.' Is Peterson going to let that plagiarism stand? It is time for Lem to come back, and document Peterson's plagiarism, and I have it on good authority that this entry is by no means his only recently plagiarized entry. Peterson's plagiarism has not ended.
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by Philo Sofee »

Marcus wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 5:26 pm
so, it has been clearly pointed out that Peterson plagiarized his latest entry on 'sentient puddles.' Is Peterson going to let that plagiarism stand? It is time for Lem to come back, and document Peterson's plagiarism, and I have it on good authority that this entry is by no means his only recently plagiarized entry. Peterson's plagiarism has not ended.
LEM!!! LEM!!! LEM!!! LEMMM!!!!!!!!! We WANT LEM!!!!! :D
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Re: SeN Continues Its Love Affair With The Discovery Institute

Post by DrStakhanovite »

Marcus wrote:
Fri Mar 10, 2023 5:26 pm
so, it has been clearly pointed out that Peterson plagiarized his latest entry on 'sentient puddles.' Is Peterson going to let that plagiarism stand? It is time for Lem to come back, and document Peterson's plagiarism, and I have it on good authority that this entry is by no means his only recently plagiarized entry. Peterson's plagiarism has not ended.
He is qualifying it now:
Daniel C. Peterson wrote:These four blog posts represent an initial pass through a topic that interests me very much and that, should I continue to survive past my sell-by date, I intend to deepen and extend considerably. They do not claim any originality for themselves or for me. And the same can be said about this blog entry itself.
This is how he'll deny assertions of plagiarism.
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